explaining that the “scope of review refers to the confines within which an appellate court must conduct its examination, i.e., the ‘what’ that the appellate court is permitted to examine, while the ‘[s]tandard of review addresses the manner by which that examination is conducted, the degree of scrutiny to be applied by the appellate court.’”
How later courts described this case
- explaining that the “scope of review refers to the confines within which an appellate court must conduct its examination, i.e., the ‘what’ that the appellate court is permitted to examine, while the ‘[s]tandard of review addresses the manner by which that examination is conducted, the degree of scrutiny to be applied by the appellate court.’”
- recognizing difficulty in LRC’s task, “not only because of the political and local interests that are affected by any change in the existing scheme, but also because accommodating one [constitutional] command can make accomplishing another command more difficult.”
- acknowledging, in the context of state legislative redistricting, that redistricting “has an inevitably legislative, and therefore an inevitably political, element,” but indicating that constitutional requirements function as a “brake on the most overt of potential excesses and abuse”
- noting that constitutional restrictions in Section 16 “recognize that communities indeed have shared interests for which they can more effectively advocate when they can act as a united body and when they have representatives who are responsive to those interests.”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Justice SAYLOR,
concurring and dissenting.
The majority opinion is remarkable in many aspects, including its timeliness, its scope, and the passages of salutary guidance which it provides. For the most part, I support the clarification of the appellate review for redistricting challenges, particularly in terms of: the acceptance that alternate plans may be employed by challengers to address their heavy burden of proof; the movement toward a more circumspect position regarding the role of population equality; and the recognition of the interplay among the several requirements of the Pennsylvania Constitution pertaining to redistricting. My thoughts, however, do not align with the majority’s criticisms of the Legislative Reapportionment Commission, inasmuch as I have limited perspective concerning the difficulties encountered by the Commission in crafting a redistricting plan.
In light of the inevitability of dividing some political subdivisions in the redistricting exercise, the appellate review of plan challenges preeminently represents an exercise in line drawing. I use this term figuratively, of course, since the Court is not generally in a position to draw the boundaries on a map, but it does determine the degree of latitude to be accorded to a legislative reapportionment commission in arranging voting district boundaries. The allocation of the burdens and the affordance of deference in the judicial review reflect the complex nature of a commission’s task and the constraints inherent in its oversight. Indeed, I had no illusions in 2002 that, had the then-existing legislative reapportionment commission narrowed or otherwise altered the range of considerations taken into account in fashioning voting-district boundaries, there could not have been fewer divisions. Moreover, with regard to the 2011 Final Plan, I agree with the majority that it is an improvement over the 2001 plan, see Majority Opinion, at 755-56, which surmounted the challenges raised in the appeals before this Court.
While the majority correctly observes that those challenges were narrower in scope than the lead ones presented here, consideration of the overall plan was encompassed in my own review. The concerns which I set forth in the Albert decision were premised on such consideration, and I adjudged the 2001 plan to be entitled to deference. See Albert v. 2001 Legislative Reapportionment Comm’n, 567 Pa. 670, 688 , 790 A.2d 989, 1000 (2002) (Saylor, J., concurring). Ultimately, then, on the merits, and respecting the substantial deference which is to be accorded to such a plan, I believe the 2011 Legislative Reapportionment Plan is also constitutionally permissible. It therefore follows that I remain unable to join the mandate of the Court.